SYSTEM: ANY
Long preamble: For Christmas one year, we gave my son
The New Teen Titans volume 1, and he left it in Ottawa. Eventually my brother-in-law returned it and my son wasn't around (I think he was at work). I decided to read it. At which point I discovered that there was introduction or foreword by Marv Wolfman. (I can't check any of this, for the book has disappeared back into the black hole that is my son's room.)
He mentioned something he had done when creating the new Teen Titans: He made sure that each triplet of the six main characters had something in common. Robin, Cyborg, and Changeling all had self-image problems in a way: one was concerned about being his own man, one concerned about being a man, and one concerned about being liked though he figured he was a Jonah. He goes through the items that the women had, but it extended on, too: Raven, Robin, and Cyborg probably had something. No matter how you sliced it, that three of them had something in common.
It was Wolfman's way of making sure that this was a group of people who would be friends and associates, rather than a junior Justice League.
Just recently, I ran down the list of players for this play-by-email game I'm doing. Right now, it's a shakedown phase and I'm doing solo adventures with each one, and each adventure has its own tone:
- The famous architect who has just discovered he is half-fey (sort of a changeling) and who controls shadows: his adventure has a sort of DC Sandman vibe
- The intrepid agent and vigilante who is skilled at espionage: he is slowly uncovering what will be a conspiracy to control something, probably the government
- The big lovable earth-controlling lug who adores sharks but is afraid of water: he is the new guy on the (NPC) team, so he is the fly in the ointment for a plot to gain revenge on the team
- The kids' science show host with transmutation powers who tries to make every moment a teachable moment: his is a very Silver Age story, with a villain who has Alteration Ray (growth) and whose eventual purpose is as yet unknown
Not exactly a set of cogs that mesh together to form a watch.
But what if I (or any GM) took a hint from Marv Wolfman and from
Spirit of the Century? What if I asked each player to say what his character has in common with somebody else (or two somebody elses)?
We've done this informally in session 0 at the table, where people riff off each other ("Oh, so your earth police liaison can be my sister, so we run into each other that way"). But why not make it formal?
(It occurs to me that some of the background questions in
Masks do this, but it's a lot more structured in
Masks.)
Sometimes that reason is baked into the campaign:
- You're all students at the Cugat School for the Different
- You're all in the same squad in the military/spy service/police
- You're all family members
- You're all outcasts because of your powers
- You're all on the run from the Spinelli mob
Good players do this anyway: find a reason for the characters to be together. Yeah, eventually someone might leave because the pressures make it inevitable, but that's a player choice. You have to find a reason why your supposed loner character is hanging around with these guys in Spandex, right?
What I'm proposing is a little more Justice League, because the reason can be as small as "I know and respect person X".
Anyway, the point is to give the characters a reason to hang around together besides "We're the characters that the players came up with."
